The Price of Celebrity
by Lorata
Summary: ["The price of celebrity," says Beetee. "We were targeted from both sides. The Capitol killed the victors they suspected of being rebels. The rebels killed those they thought to be allied with the Capitol." - Mockingjay, Chapter 26.] Ronan, District 2's first Career Victor, and Petra, its youngest, are in the Capitol when it falls.


**[NOTE: From a prompt meme on my LJ: _Ronan's death, canon or AU_. There's a reason I don't play in canon beyond a certain point. If you do the math, 34 victors died offscreen in Mockingjay; if you assume the outer districts lost a good portion of theirs during the Quarter Quell, then over half of the remaining victors would have been from Career districts. It's yet another example of how bloodthirsty Coin's regime is, but the scene keeps going and it gets (understandably) eclipsed by Coin's "let's murder Capitol children" plan.]**

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><p>The mansion rocks from the latest explosion; someone has dropped another round of bombs outside in the courtyard, and once the ringing dies down comes the low wail of grief and horror that means somewhere there's a pile of disembodied limbs and innards strewn across the pavement. Ronan doesn't bother to look. Petra hesitates, grips the handle of her cane and glances toward the window.<p>

"Don't," Odin says, and Petra hisses out a furious breath. "It will change nothing if you look."

The Capitol is falling — has fallen. It's only a matter of time before they're here.

More explosions, inside the mansion this time. They'll have blown open the front doors. Automatic gunfire sounds in a sharp patter — sharper cries, dying off as the bodies making them are cut down — and the pounding of boots up the stairs. The Peacekeepers bark orders down below but it doesn't matter, none of it matters. They've lost.

The Victors' Village lies in ashes, burned to the ground by rebel hovercrafts. Lyme and Claudius turned traitor and disappeared; likely they've been shot or buried in a landslide under Eagle Pass, gone and forgotten and only turning up as official casualties months later when someone runs over the list of Victors to see who's missing. All that's left of Two's Victors — over half a century of triumph and training and pretensions of honour — is in this room: two old men and one girl young enough to be their granddaughter.

Ronan is seventy-six years old, and the world is collapsing around him. He has never been so tired.

Petra winces at the rattle of gunfire below. Her hip must be paining her after all this time standing, but each time she tries to sit she bounces back up again, buoyed by nervous energy. "What will happen when they get here?"

"They won't," Odin says, and to Petra he is her mentor's mentor, impossibly wise and experienced, but he would have been a toddler when Ronan won and Ronan is incapable of seeing him as anything but young. Young and impossibly naive, even forty-some years after his victory. Even after watching his own Victor walk into the Arena a second time and never come back. "There are Peackeepers on every floor, my dear. They will stop this attack. Those rebels will not succeed."

Another explosion; the guard on their side of the door doesn't move, hidden behind his helmet, but his fingers tighten on the stock of his rifle. The members of Snow's personal squads are all on their first twenty years of service, rotated out to administration or command positions after that if they so choose; this man won't be older than thirty-five, and in all likelihood is a decade younger still. He'll have grown up with the tapes of Ronan and Odin's victories; would have been fired up at first to get protection detail for his boyhood heroes. Children, children all of them, dying by the minute.

More people have died in the war these rebels started than in the entire history of the Hunger Games. It's not just about the Games, of course, it's tyranny and rape and starvation and a thousand other things, but Ronan can't shake the feeling that these upstarts would rather burn the nation to the ground than see it treated badly. As long as the Capitol falls, what else matters? No sacrifice too great for the sake of freedom.

He wonders if the thousands of civilians crushed to death under bombed-out mountains or factories or bleeding out in the streets would agree. He wonders if the survivors will say the same a year from now when the new government turns its head and shows the world the same face as the one it just deposed, as it is statistically likely to do.

Ronan runs a hand over his face. "We'll be taken prisoner," he says. "I will most likely be executed, publicly, as a personal friend and lapdog of President Snow." Personal friend, always a hilarious touch, because Coriolanus didn't have friends, only toys he hasn't tired of yet. It had taken fifty years of constant vigilance for Ronan to keep himself in the useful pile, rather than the discards, and he hadn't done it because he enjoyed the mildly-poisoned tea biscuits and Coriolanus' grandstanding about his latest hilarious atrocities. "You and Odin, it's hard to say."

Odin will most likely executed too, but quietly; the loss of his Victor in the Quarter Quell could create a dangerous amount of sympathy, since all the footage of Odin during the Games is of him harried and desperate to bring his boy-now-man home a second time. His own Games were a bastion of honour and sportsmanship — no cackling over deaths or lingering on the kills for Odin, oh no — and that could be tricky to spin when attempting to paint the Twos as monsters. In any event he's a fixture of the old regime, and the more problematic his position, the swifter and more silent his removal.

For Petra it could go either way. Her injury made her a good candidate to be poster child for the atrocities of the Capitol — look at the poor little girl, crippled forever — but that she'd spent the last few months on television, delivering anti-rebel propos to the people of the Capitol and District 2. They'd used the Mellark boy for the districts, but for those already loyal, Petra's pride and devotion despite the Arena leaving her scarred and limping provided a beacon of hope. If the rebels wanted to make an example of her, well. It wouldn't take much to convince the public that she was not a girl but a monster.

The other Victors had done nothing but remain in their Village, and they'd perished in fire anyway. In a world where Petra three years ago killed ten other teenagers to get to where she stood today, Ronan doubted her youth would buy much sympathy.

It didn't take much thought to come up with the options for a pretty young girl with fiery, unpopular opinions when captured by unscrupulous, lawless brigands. Ronan withholds a shudder and shuts off the picture in his brain with decades of practice.

Petra takes a few hard breaths, cheeks spotted pink. She didn't cry the day her mentor died, though she did shout in indignation when the baker's boy claimed to have killed him; she's kept her head high and her jaw set and never let them see her anything but proud. A chill walks itself up Ronan's spine as her expression resolves; he's seen it before, the handful of times when enough years passed between the last tribute suicide that one forgot what happens to those who leap from the platforms.

"Petra —" Ronan says, and Odin's head snaps up at the tone of his voice. "Whatever you're thinking —"

"I'm not going to sit here and wait for them to capture me," Petra bites out. She's young, so young, barely more than a child, but her eyes blaze and she holds her cane with a Victor's grip and oh no. "I won't be tortured and raped and drugged and forced to betray my country, I _won't_. I won't let them get their hands on me. Odin —"

"No," says her grandmentor, choking on the word and all but recoiling in horror. It has been twice Petra's lifetime since he laid his hands around a girl's neck and twisted until it snapped, but even old hands remember the grip of a sword, and Petra's throat is soft and bare despite her Victory. "Petra, I will not. There is always hope."

The building rocks again; plaster rains down from the ceiling, skittering against the floor. The charges boom nearer now, and the Peacekeeper near the door fingers his rifle again, boots shifting just slightly against the floor. Petra turns to Odin and shakes her head. "Not anymore. They won't give me an honourable death, they'll break me first and then hang me like a traitor and I won't have it. Odin, please, don't let them —"

"I will fight them to my last breath, but I won't kill you!" Odin thunders, but Petra remains firm. The ragged breathing comes from their guard soldier. "You can't ask me this, Petra. Not this, anything but this."

Petra's expression softens, her mouth turning down at the corners, and she lays a hand on an arm twice as thick as hers. "You would fight them," she says gently. "I know you would, and they'd kill you, because this isn't the Arena where there are rules. This is madmen with guns against a man who fights with honour. They'd kill you and then there's no one left to protect me and see that it's clean. I _know_ what the rebels do to female prisoners, I've read the history books. You've seen the stories of what happened during the Dark Days too. Don't let it happen to me, please!"

Odin is a man whose world is built on fairness and justice and principles — keep your head down, work hard, do the right thing and receive rewards — for whom the system was tailored. With that crumbling around him, there's nothing for him to cling to save his own internal honour, and that won't get him far but it's all he has. Ronan knows his answer before he speaks.

"I can't," Odin says, heavy and drained and exhausted. "I'm sorry, my girl."

Ronan is the father of Two and all its children, and everything might be burning but this still rings true for a little longer. "You could help her escape," he says, and Petra swings around to stare at him, eyes wide in shock. "Odin, I'm sorry, there's no saving you and me, but Petra has a chance. I know a side entrance with a secret passage; if you guard the corridor and keep them off as long as you can, I'll help Petra through. I won't be able to follow her, I'm not fast enough, but you and I can hold them back and give her a chance. Assuming our guard here will oblige."

"Yes," says Odin immediately, his voice cracking. "Yes, I will do whatever needs to be done. Just let one of us be saved, please, for the love of Snow."

For the love of Snow indeed. The Peacekeeper stares at Ronan behind his helmet, and Ronan keeps his expression carefully blank. Finally the man flips up the visor, then pulls the spare rifle from his back. "Here," he says, handing it to Odin. He's as young as Ronan expected, wisps of sandy hair sticking out under the edge of the helmet, and he takes the older Victor through how to fire. He even gives him a few cartridges to reload, and Odin tucks them at his belt.

"Thank you," Odin rasps. The sounds of battle draw ever nearer, and he stoops, lifts Petra into his arms as though she weighs nothing and holds her close. "I'm sorry, my girl," he says into her shoulder. "I wish there were another way."

"Kill them all, then come find me," Petra says, and they all know there's no hope for that but she says it anyway, bless her. "And if you can't, take as many fuckers down as you can."

Odin sets her down with a hard smile, his good eye narrowed. "I will kill all the fuckers you would ask of me," he says, the curse twisting in his precise diction. He turns to Ronan, and Ronan first met him as a boy of seven when his family won an invitation to a Victor dinner and what can they say? Finally Odin settles on nothing, touching his fist to his chest.

"Mountains and earth," Ronan says, the words tasting of ash and blood in a world where both have been blasted to rubble.

"Mountains and earth," Odin replies, and steps through the door.

It closes behind him, and Petra sags. "There is no secret passageway out of here, is there."

Ronan lets out a breath. "No, child, there is not," he says, and she doesn't flinch, doesn't move, only nods.

"I meant what I said," Petra says, raising her voice, and ah this is not for him, now. "I'm not letting them take me. Are you going to help me or not?"

The Peacekeeper takes a step back, his visor still raised, and his eyes widen with horror. "Miss Petra, I can't —"

"You can," Petra says. Her voice cracks, just for a moment, and she swipes a hand across her eyes in a furious gesture. "You can and you will, damn it, because I'm your Victor and I am ordering you. What year did you age out?"

It's a fair guess — anyone serving in Snow's mansion would have made it to eighteen in the Centre — and the boy winces. "Sixty-seven."

Petra nods, acknowledging the point. "Sixty-seven. Claudius. He went into the Arena so you didn't have to, and now he's dead because of the people out there. He and his mentor went in to rescue the miners after the rebels bombed Eagle Pass and never came out again." She takes another breath, steadies herself. "He's dead — all the Victors are dead — because the rebels are monsters. I'm dead either way; all I'm asking is that they not be the ones to do it. You serve the president. You've guarded us with your life. Please, if you have any honour at all, give me this."

It's a good speech, and Ronan almost envies Petra the youth required to make it with that much honest fervour. The Peacekeeper swallows hard, eyes darting back and forth, but at last he swears under his breath. "Snow forgive me," he mutters, but when he raises his head his mouth has thinned and the last of the indecision has fled his features. "If they breach the hall, then yes. Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Petra lets out a quiet, keening sound she immediately chokes back. "Thank you," she says. "But one more thing — don't surprise me. I want to see it coming."

He nods, unable to speak, and Petra turns away and squeezes her eyes shut.

Ronan holds out a hand. He is seventy-six years old and tired, and this girl has stood alone long enough. "Come, Petra," he says, and when she draws near enough he wraps an arm around her and pulls her close against his chest.

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><p>Parker steps over the body of the big man, riddled with bullets and bleeding out onto the mahogany floors, his men close behind in a tight protective phalanx. "The bigger they are," quips Ryder, nudging the body with his foot, but Parker hushes him. Scans indicate three more behind the door, though motion sensors pick up nothing. Best not to get distracted.<p>

Schaffer lays the charges and blows the door; the squad backs up in defensive positions, laying down a line of cover fire, but no resistance meets them. When the smoke clears and no sound emerges, Parker motions them through.

Three corpses lie on the floor in the middle of the room; an old man and a young girl in civilian clothing, and a white-uniformed Peacekeeper. The first two have gunshot wounds in the forehead, exiting through the back of the skull, execution-style; the Peacekeeper's is in the temple, the pistol still in his hand.

"What the hell happened here," Ryder mutters, nudging them with his boots. He turns the girl over, and there's enough of her left for Parker to place her face as the one on all the propos during the early stages of the war. A quick glance at the ground near her finds a cane, and aha.

"Victors," he says, understanding clicking. The big guy outside, too, fearless in the face of death in a way that civilians never are, but with no idea how to use a gun. "Offed themselves when they heard us coming."

"Didn't want to face justice," Ryder says, and he leans over and spits on the old man's back. "Fucking cowards, that's Career honour for you. Only as long as it suits them."

"Cut the chatter," Parker snaps. "Make sure they're dead for real, then let's move on. The clean-up crew will get them later, and we've still got to find the president."

The fighting continues long after the bodies cool. After the mansion falls and the president is taken into custody, it's days before anyone remembers to come back.


End file.
